I disagreed with this Washington Post editorial so much I had to comment on it. Here are the opening paragraphs:

The resilience of the American worker is one of the most underreported stories of the 2020s. From red tape to import taxes, successive governments have erected barriers to success. Yet America’s workers have persevered and figured out ways to prosper.

A new American Abundance Index illustrates this. The project from Human Progress, an arm of the Cato Institute, reveals the steady rise of the average worker’s purchasing power. The premise of the index is simple: how many hours do you need to work, compared to the month or year before, to be able to afford the “basket of goods,” which is a standard set of household items and services that comprise the Consumer Price Index used to calculate inflation.

The “time price” is how many hours of work it takes to purchase the basket of goods. The “abundance” is how much of the basket one hour of work can buy. The story told by the index is a very good one: since recordkeeping began, “abundance” for average private sector workers comes out to a net increase of 13.8 percent.

Why, oh why, do people who do not understand statistics rely so heavily on it? Let me offer a hint: whenever you read “average”, ask yourself whether whatever is being measured occurs in a normal distribution. If it does not, the average will be grossly misleading. In this case “abundance” is propaganda not analysis. The index quietly assumes that gains anywhere in the income distribution count equally as ‘abundance’ for everyone.

In the United States incomes do not occur in a normal distribution; they are heavily loaded to the right of the distribution, i.e. a relatively small percentage of people earn a considerable proportion of income. You may argue over whether that is good, bad, or indifferent. I see it as merely a fact. Because income growth in the top percentile is orders of magnitude larger than the rest, even small changes there dominate mean-based measures.

I took the trouble of recalculating the Abundance Index using the same sources as the original source used but omitting the top 1% of income earners. Some interesting things became apparent.

The topmost graph illustrates the change in abundance from March 2006 to the present. As you can see for the lower 99% of Americans abundance was materially flat; it wasn’t until 2020 that it began to increase for us. The original index showed a 14% increase over the period; the revised one reflect a 5% increase over the period. In other words, yes, we have become better off but not a lot better off.

The graph on the bottom right illustrates why that may be so. The top 1% of income earners captured 17.6% of income in 2006; now they capture 20.9% of income. That fact alone discredits the index as a measure of general worker well-being. The moral of the story is don’t use unadjusted means for skewed distributions when making welfare claims.

But the topmost graphic also illustrates something even more interesting. What happened in 2020 that improved the measured abundance of those in the lower 99%? The answer, obviously, is COVID-19 or, more correctly, the pandemic and the federal government response to it. Three things happened:

• There was $4.6 trillion in government spending which prevented collapse and gave workers leverage.
• There was a labor shortage caused by 1.2 million deaths from COVID, retirements, and workforce exits.
• Workers, enabled by enhanced unemployment benefits, refused wages they deemed exploitative.

None of these conditions were desirable; they were merely revealing.

That was anomalous; those conditions were not sustainable. In other words it took a crisis to produce abundance for most Americans.

If your Inbox is anything like mine, you are being absolutely deluged with notifications of articles. Yesterday one such article I did find interesting was in Quartz and was written by Chris Morris. The article describes the monthly layoffs in January 2026:

Employers laid off 108,435 people last month, the highest January number since 2009, according to a new report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the same time, hiring intentions haven’t been lower since then.

The number reflects a 118% increase over January 2025 and more than doubles the total layoffs of last December. New hires came in at just 5,306, the lowest number since Challenger began tracking that data point in 2009.

What struck me about the article was how little actual insight it offered. I’m going to attempt to correct that.

I’m not sure whether it will make you feel better or worse but just about half of the announced layoffs were in just two companies, Amazon and United Parcel Services (UPS), and UPS’s layoffs can be attributed to the loss of its Amazon contracts.

That naturally leads to the follow-up question: what’s going on with Amazon? The short answer is AI just not in the way most people think of it.

The longer answer is that Amazon is in a fight for survival of its current margin structure and strategic dominance. Contrary to what you may believe, Amazon isn’t just a big retailer. For the first ten years of its corporate history it was an IPO in search of a business model. In 2006 it finally happened on one and it wasn’t as an online retail bookseller (its origins). That was when Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born. Since then it’s been clear: Amazon is a web services provider that dabbles a bit in online retail sales. Sometimes it makes money in online retail sales, sometimes it loses money but it always makes money providing web services.

AI summaries in web searches are already cutting “click through rates” by more than 50%. Fewer click throughs changes the economics of web sites. That in turn will inevitably result in fewer web sites. A similar thing is happening to online APIs. There are fewer discrete service requests, fewer API calls, and lower marginal revenue per workload.

AWS’s main business is providing online infrastructure for web sites and online API service providers. Couple that with an enormous expansion in capex for training and inference and AWS clearly has a major problem.

What about LLM AI service providers? Don’t they use online infrastructure?

Ignore the names you might have heard of in LLM AI, ChatGPT (OpenAI) and Claude (Anthropic). There are only four actual prospective leading suppliers of LLM AI services:

Google
Microsoft
IBM (via enterprise integration rather than consumer scale)
Amazon

By “leading supplier” I mean vertically integrated, capital-scale LLM providers who can survive margin compression, not just model builders. Everyone else is either a tenant, a feature, or a future acquisition target.

Amazon’s recent actions (internalization of logistics, contract shedding, headcount discipline, and ruthless focus on the margin) are best explained as preemptive capital reallocation to defend its position in an online infrastructure market that is increasingly AI-driven. It doesn’t need AWS to grow; it needs AWS not to shrink while its AI capex explodes.

The other three candidates are much less exposed than Amazon, each for different reasons.

These layoffs are not cyclical weakness. They are the visible surface of a capital war.

As peace talks between Russia and Ukraine drag on, a recent wargame reported in the Wall Street Journal by Yaroslav Trofimov highlights a more immediate concern. The wargame was a simulation of an invasion of Lithuania by Russia. I’m going to extract a few telling quotes.

“Our assessment is that Russia will be able to move large amounts of troops within one year,” the Netherlands Defense Minister Ruben Brekelmans said in an interview. “We see that they are already increasing their strategic inventories, and are expanding their presence and assets along the NATO borders.”

Based on the wargame’s result, Russia need only move 15,000 troops to seize and occupy a corridor within Lithuania.

The exercise simulating a Russian incursion into Lithuania, organized in December by Germany’s Die Welt newspaper together with the German Wargaming Center of the Helmut-Schmidt University of the German Armed Forces, became an object of heated conversation within Europe’s security establishment even before the newspaper published its results on Thursday. The exercise involved 16 former senior German and NATO officials, lawmakers and prominent security experts role-playing a scenario set in October 2026.

In the exercise, Russia used the pretext of a humanitarian crisis in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to seize the Lithuanian city of Marijampole, a key crossroads in the narrow gap between Russia and Belarus. Russian portrayals of the invasion as a humanitarian mission were sufficient for the U.S. to decline invoking NATO’s Article 5 that calls for allied assistance. Germany proved indecisive, and Poland, while mobilizing, didn’t send troops across the border into Lithuania. The German brigade already deployed to Lithuania failed to intervene, in part because Russia used drones to lay mines on roads leading out of its base.

“Deterrence depends not only on capabilities, but on what the enemy believes about our will, and in the wargame my ‘Russian colleagues’ and I knew: Germany will hesitate. And this was enough to win,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst who played the Russian chief of general staff.

That is the article’s most important insight.

In real life, Lithuania and other allies would have had enough intelligence warnings to avoid this scenario, said Rear Adm. Giedrius Premeneckas, Lithuania’s chief of defense staff. Even without allies, Lithuania’s own armed forces—17,000 in peacetime and 58,000 after an immediate mobilization—would have been able to deal with a limited threat to Marijampole, he said. Russia itself would have to consider the high stakes involved, he added: “It would be a dilemma for Russia to sustain Kaliningrad, and if Russia starts something, it must be said very clearly by NATO that if you do, you will lose Kaliningrad.”

That is the prescription the article ultimately arrives at.

One caution is in order. Mr. Trofimov asserts that Vladimir Putin has stated an intention to restore Russia’s tsarist glory. That is not accurate. Putin has expressed nostalgia and grievance about Russia’s lost status and the dissolution of the Soviet Union but he has never articulated a program to recreate a tsarist empire. Claims to the contrary are not evidence-based analysis but psychoanalysis and they distract from the far more important issue: not what Putin wants, but what he believes he can do without triggering an effective response.

Russia’s experience in Ukraine also illustrates the limits of its military capabilities. Despite substantial investment and mass mobilization, Russia has struggled to achieve decisive results against a single opponent operating on its own territory with Western support. Those limitations are not speculative; they are now well understood inside the Russian military and political leadership. If anything, they should be more apparent to Mr. Putin than to outside observers. This further undercuts arguments that Russian actions are driven by expansive ideological ambitions rather than by calculations of opportunity, risk, and allied hesitation.

In my opinion our course of action should be

1. We should abandon discussions of percent of GDP in military expenditure and talk about capabilities.

Previous wargame exercises have shown that we need at least one week to field a counter-force. The implications of that are clear. The focus of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which have been on post-occupation resistance, are inadequate. If a credible counter-force cannot be fielded in under a week, then deterrence exists only on paper.

2. We should produce objective evaluations of the capabilities of our European allies.

I presume we already have. Nonetheless, it bears mentioning. I also presume it’s not the sort of thing that should be announced publicly. All of our European allies should be evaluated in this way. I find the assumption that Germany cannot be depended on very troubling. If Germany cannot be relied upon in the opening phase of a European defense crisis, NATO’s collective defense model collapses into improvisation.

3. A date certain by which our European allies must have the necessary capabilities should be established and communicated with them.

Along with the consequences of failing to meet the “drop dead” date. This would not be coercion, it would be clarity: allies would retain full sovereignty over their choices but not insulation from their consequences.

It may be that NATO has exceeded its sell-by date. If so, that judgment will ultimately be made by events, not declarations.

The picture above is of the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show’s banner when entering the Javits Center which is where the breed competitions are held.

I haven’t posted in the last few days and regular readers may be wondering what’s been going on. You may also be curious about why I haven’t posted much about our Samoyed, Jack, recently.

The short version is that Jack has been very busy for the last few months competing in conformation shows. “Conformation shows” are what most people mean when they say “dog shows”. Technically, dog shows are a strategy for identifying breeding stock in dogs and bitches.

I should mention at this point that in the dog fancy “dog” means specifically a male dog and “bitch” means a female dog. We’re pretty casual about throwing around the “b” word. We just mean a female dog. Jack is, of course, a dog and has been competing with other Samoyeds around the country since May of last year. At this point Jack’s American Kennel Club official registered name is Grand Champion Silver (GCHS) Champion (CH) Vanderbilt’s Lucky Day. “Vanderbilt” is his breeders’ kennel name.

Without getting too much into the weeds “GCHS” means that Jack has competed in a heckuva lot of dog shows, winning “Best of Breed” and group placements in many of them.

This week Jack competed with other Samoyeds and about 2,500 other dogs and bitches in New York City in the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, frequently called the “most prestigious dog show in the United States”. Jack received an Award of Merit.

I’ll be posting more about the show and where we stayed over the next few days but I wanted to provide a “heads up” on our excellent adventure.

There is an American idiom “talk like a Dutch uncle” meaning “give a severe reproof”. For decades, American presidents have done the opposite with Europe: flattering, subsidizing, and indulging strategic dependency. This week NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, formerly the prime minister of the Netherlands, talked like a Dutch uncle to the European parliament foreign affairs and security committees:

On my relationship with the President, hey, listen, if somebody is doing good stuff, and President Trump is doing a lot of good stuff, I believe. I know I’m irritating a lot of you again, but I think so, because as I said, also in Davos, the 2% reached by all NATO countries now at the end of 2025 would never, ever, ever have happened without Trump. Do you really think that Spain and Italy and Belgium and Canada would have decided to move from 1.5 to 2%? Italy spending 10 billion more now on defence at the beginning of the year without President Trump? No way. It would not have happened. And do you really think that in The Hague we would have come to the 5% commitment without President Trump? No way. So, I think he is very important to NATO.

[…]

And if anyone thinks here, again, that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t. We can’t. We need each other. And why do we need each other? I tell you, first of all, because also the US needs NATO. And the US is not only in NATO to prevent a mistake after the First World War, not to re-engage with Europe, and then again, the long arm of history reaching out to the US again in the Second World War — as Churchill famously said in his speech in 1941 in the US Congress. They are also in NATO because for the US to stay safe, and by the way, Arctic region is evidence here, they need a secure Arctic. They need a secure Euro-Atlantic, and they also need a secure Europe. So, the US has every interest in NATO, as much as Canada and the European NATO Allies. But for Europe, if you really want to go it alone, and those who you are pleading for that, forget that you can never get there with 5%. It will be 10%. You have to build up your own nuclear capability. That costs billions and billions of euros. You will lose then in that scenario, you would lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella. So hey, good luck.

Rutte’s remarks about Trump are mostly a distraction. The real issue is not which American president deserves credit for browbeating Europe, but whether Europe is structurally capable of defending itself at all. As I have said before the question is not whether the U. S. needs Europe. The question is how much does the United States need a Europe that is disinterested in defending itself? There is a deeper problem I won’t rehearse here: for at least fifty years, U.S. policy has implicitly preferred weak allies. That is a policy I strongly disagree with, but it explains much of what we are now seeing.

Multiple U. S. war game exercises have shown that our allies need to be able to sustain themselves for at least a week without U. S. assistance. Are they actually capable of doing that now? That question cannot be answered based on what percents of their GDPs they spend on defense but only on a dispassionate analysis of their defense capabilities.

Sec. Gen. Rutte has given them the address they need. The open question is whether Europe still has the political culture required to hear it.

In the Wall Street Journal James Freeman pushes back against the notion that the United States is not exception:

In the scene from a show called “The Newsroom,” Mr. Daniels is wittingly or unwittingly portraying a self-important and semi-informed media personage. His character dismisses the idea that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world and argues that freedom doesn’t particularly distinguish the U.S. He quickly rattles off an extensive list of other countries where people also enjoy freedom.

What he does not mention is that in every single one of the countries on his list, free people enjoy the protection of the American defense umbrella. The smug character then goes on to make the preposterous suggestion that roughly 180 countries in the world are free, as if it’s the natural state of things and not a blessing paid for with the blood of Americans and other brave people over many generations.

Of course there have also been enormous financial bills to pay. In only one country did free people build an economy large enough to fund the worldwide defense of liberty for decades. This exceptional and indispensable quality of America underlines why the financial health of the U.S. is also indispensable. There is no backstop for us. It’s essential that U.S. government spending is reduced and put on a path toward budget balance not just for Americans but because a collapse of the United States would be uniquely catastrophic for the world. Search history and it’s hard to find happy endings for governments that took on so much debt that interest payments rose above defense spending, as has recently occurred in the U.S.

I think he is actually pushing back on the notion that the United States is not, in Madeleine Albright’s felicitous phrase, “the indispensable nation”. While I think that, technically, our European allies are now capable of defending themselves, I seriously doubt that they can do so without a sharp reduction in their standards of living. More on this subject later.

In living memory only four major powers, by which I mean countries that are capable of projecting power, have had strategic self-sufficiency: the United States, Russia, China, and India. Of those only one has combined strategic self-sufficiency with the absence of persistent, society-wide structural poverty. Unlike Russia, China, and India, the United States has never been structurally poor despite episodes of hardship during recessions.

In that sense, if in no other, the United States is, indeed, exceptional.

I have long maintained that human lifespan could be attributed to different factors in different periods of life:

Birth to teens the most important factor was care—both parental and professional healthcare
Teens to middle age the most important factor was behavior
Middle age and later the most important factor was genetics

It appears that science is increasingly confirming that last part of my hypothesis if this report by David Cox at NBC News can be believed:

A person’s genes play a far greater role in likely lifespan than previously thought, according to a major new study published Thursday in the journal Science.

Using data from human twin studies, an international team of researchers arrived at the conclusion that the genetic contribution to how long we’re likely to live is as high as 55%.

This new finding is strikingly higher than previous estimates, which have calculated the role of genetics in lifespan could range from 6% to 33%. It’s likely to intrigue — and perhaps disappoint — the fast-growing community of longevity influencers and self-described biohackers touting longer lives through supplements and customized drug regimens.

The study authors said they arrived at this very different figure by separating out what they termed extrinsic mortality (defined as deaths from external factors such as accidents, homicides, environmental hazards and infectious diseases) and intrinsic mortality (deaths caused by internal biological factors such as age-related diseases, genetic mutations and the general decline of health with age).

Through treating these two categories of death separately, the researchers said they were able to get a far more accurate estimate of the relationship between genetics and lifespan. It also matches with findings regarding the role of genes in other key physiological traits: Height, body fat distribution and muscle build are all thought to be at least 50% heritable.

As regular readers of this blog may recall I am a student of my family’s history. At present I am older than my father was when he died and older than both grandfathers when they died. I have also outlived one great-grandfather and will soon outlive the other three.

I have no plans of dying in the immediate future but last year I actually felt old for the first time in my life. There may be something to this heredity stuff.

In her Washington Post op-ed Julia R. Cartwright points to a real problem with the Federal Reserve but does not quite reach the greater conclusion she should draw from it. The Federal Reserve’s structure was built in the early 20th century, during the very peak of technocracy when leaders of big corporations preached that the U. S. system of government was old-fashioned and antiquated and should be replaced by, well, themselves. One of the earliest and most influential exponents of this worldview was Walter S. Gifford, then chairman of AT&T, who openly argued that modern society should be governed by professional managers and engineers rather than by the clumsy mechanisms of democratic politics. Ms. Cartwright starts by reflecting on the recent failures of the Fed and the political brouhaha over the Fed during the second Trump Administration and proposes a rules-based system she calls a “monetary constitution”.

She’s right. The deeper implication of her argument is not merely that discretion should be constrained, but that monetary governance itself should be treated as a formally designed socio-technical system rather than an artisanal priesthood. We should have a real-time data collection system coupled to a rules-based expert system with, and this is the part she misses, human beings exerting the ultimate oversight of the system. We have known for decades, since the Taylor Rule was first promulgated, that this was possible and now we have the technology to make it practical.

That isn’t just a problem for the Federal Reserve. An enormous number of companies, government agencies and departments, and institutions would benefit from such expert-systems with mandatory human oversight. The challenges lie in constructing them and convincing people that it’s the right thing to do.

In his Washington Post column Fareed Zakaria quotes JD Vance’s claim that the West faces “civilizational erasure,” which Vance attributes to Europe’s approach to immigration and identity. Zakaria replies that this is a misunderstanding: what truly defines the West is not culture or ethnicity but the gradual limitation of state power: Magna Carta, independent courts, private property, civil society; and that Trumpism represents an erosion of those traditions.

I find this framing problematic, even though I agree with much of Zakaria’s underlying concern.

The problem is that Zakaria accepts Vance’s dramatic civilizational language while quietly redefining what “civilization” means. Vance uses the term in a cultural-historical sense: peoples, continuity, inherited ways of life. Zakaria replaces that with a procedural-institutional definition: courts, rights, constraints on rulers. These are not the same object. Borrowing the rhetoric of “civilizational erasure” while substituting a technocratic definition of civilization is philosophically incoherent.

Once the word “civilization” is taken seriously, a deeper dilemma appears. Either constraints on rulers are essential to Western civilization, or they are contingent achievements. They cannot be both.

If they are essential, then episodes like Germany from 1933 to 1945 or the United States under prolonged emergency governance, are not mere political deviations but civilizational events. In that case, the real problem is not Trump or MAGA, but the inherent instability of modern mass societies, which repeatedly concentrate power despite constitutional forms. Civilizational “erasure” would then be structural and recurrent, not exceptional.

If, on the other hand, constraints on rulers are contingent, historically impressive but fragile, then “civilizational erasure” is simply the wrong category. What we are witnessing is ordinary institutional decay: factional capture, bureaucratic expansion, symbolic law, declining competence. No special metaphysical status for “the West” is required to explain any of this.

Mr. Zakaria wants to occupy an impossible middle ground, limited government as the West’s defining essence, but its repeated collapse as merely incidental. Logically, that position cannot hold.

Where I agree with Mr. Zakaria is that the United States is indeed in serious decline. Where I disagree is in treating this primarily as a Trump-era or even MAGA-era phenomenon. What we are experiencing looks more like forty years of cumulative institutional entropy driven by party polarization, intra-party factional control, and incentive decay across the political class. The erosion is not a betrayal of Western principles so much as the predictable behavior of large bureaucratic democracies under modern conditions.

In that sense, “civilizational erasure” may be rhetorically powerful, but, like a fan-dancers fan, it obscures more than it reveals. The more honest diagnosis is not moral failure, but systemic drift and the unsettling possibility that no modern mass society is capable of sustaining the rule of law indefinitely without sliding toward managerial or factional control.